


Home Screen

by booksong



Series: Technical Difficulties [2]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Daichi's phone torments him this time, IT-tech!Suga, M/M, it took me almost 3 years but here it is, it's just a little glimpse back into their lives but I hope everyone enjoys it, student!Daichi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-07 18:46:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12847266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/booksong/pseuds/booksong
Summary: A companion toAdd New Contact."Daichi reached over his notes and tapped his phone idly to check how many more minutes of Horikawa-sensei’s droning about rhomboid muscles he’d have to endure, but the moment his home screen lit up to display the time (twenty more minutes), he froze.  He put his phone back down flat.  Very slowly, he leaned back in his seat, tipped his head back, and pressed both his hands over his face.It wasfartoo early for this kind of thing."(Or; Daichi's new phone works like a charm, but he discovers he needs to take it to the IT repair desk anyway.)





	Home Screen

**Author's Note:**

> *While this fic technically makes sense as a standalone, you will get much, much more out of it if you read how Daichi and Suga met in [Add New Contact](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2860421) first.
> 
> When I wrote _Add New Contact_ in December of 2014 as a gift for the Haikyuu!! Secret Santa exchange, I could never have imagined it becoming as popular or apparently as beloved as it is now. It was my first time writing Daisuga, my first time writing a full blown AU, and it was born from me coming up with a single line nearly every commenter seemed to love: ‘Do it for the hot IT guy’. Three years later (I know, it freaks me out too!), I’m deeply touched and honored by the love the fandom has shown it and me. For quite a while now readers have asked me if I ever would write a sequel, and I’ve toyed with the idea just to peek back in. And then the [Fic Writers Week](https://ficwritersweek.tumblr.com/) Day 2 prompt came along asking for writers to post 'bonus content', and I figured that was enough of a sign, so here it is. I hope everyone enjoys revisiting this AU as much as I did!

Daichi was sitting in his 8 a.m physiology lecture, passionately regretting this particular academic choice with every fiber of his sleep-deprived being, when he saw it.

He’d reached over his notes and tapped his phone idly to check how many more minutes of Horikawa-sensei’s droning about rhomboid muscles he’d have to endure, but the moment his home screen lit up to display the time (twenty more minutes), he froze. He put his phone back down flat. Very slowly, he leaned back in his seat, tipped his head back, and pressed both his hands over his face. 

It was _far_ too early for this kind of thing.

Daichi lowered his hands to find the girl a couple seats down his row giving him a look that hovered between concerned and uncomfortable. He gave her a pained smile that was probably not particularly reassuring, but he had his own problems at the moment. He resolutely turned his phone over so the screen was facedown on the desk, and forced himself, red-faced and tight-jawed, to take notes for twenty more long, long minutes. 

When Horikawa-sensei finally dismissed them, Daichi fairly shot out of his seat, tossed his bag over his shoulder, and left the lecture hall walking double-time. He cut across the courtyard, wove around a knot of dead-eyed fourth-years clutching their coffees like lifelines, and made a beeline toward the university bookstore.

Gripped in the hand not holding the strap of his bookbag was Daichi’s smartphone. It was close to brand new, just four months old—screen uncracked, battery near-full, already packed with photos, apps, and his favorite music. It had never turned off on him when he needed it, and it had never been dropped from a second story window.

But it was, in its way, still giving him technical difficulties. Clearly, he needed to see an expert.

 

He had just taken his foot off the last stair and down onto the smooth polished wood floor of the bookstore’s lowest level when Tsukishima looked up and caught sight of him.

Daichi had been half-hoping someone else would be working this morning—Yamaguchi, maybe, or even the IT desk’s newest recruit, a nervous little computer science student who was apparently excellent at diagnosing software issues when she could bring herself to look the customers in the eye and form complete sentences.

The look Tsukishima gave him was much more complicated than the simple disdain he tended to visit on the student customers who came in cradling headphones with frayed wires and blue-screened laptops. It wasn’t a particularly _happy_ look…but at least it was perhaps quietly resigned. Daichi would take what he could get.

“Sugawara-senpai,” Tsukishima said blandly, lifting his eyebrows a fraction and maintaining eye contact as Daichi approached, “It’s time for my break.”

“Hmm?” said the other tech on duty, glancing up from where his feathery-haired head was bent intently over the keyboard of a whirring laptop. “Didn’t you just finish it a few minutes ag— _oh_.”

Sugawara Koushi, Daichi’s boyfriend of three months, two weeks, three days and now one morning class, closed the lid of the laptop in front of him and pushed himself around in his swivel chair. He leaned against the counter of the circular desk, propping his elbows up and resting his chin casually on one hand. It was a pose very reminscient of the first time Daichi had ever seen him, and he was probably doing it on purpose.

“Good morning, sir,” Suga said in his most cheerful customer service voice, “What can we help you with today?”

There was a brief moment when Daichi, fresh off an 8 a.m lecture and a minor heart attack, considered not playing along. But Suga’s eyes were grey-brown and warm and dangerously fond, and that thought didn’t last long.

“Well, you see,” he began, stepping up and placing his new phone on the counter between them. Tsukishima wandered away and sat down heavily in another one of the desk chairs, picking up a set of expensive-looking headphones and apparently ready to tune them out entirely. “I had a lecture this morning…a very _early_ lecture that _someone_ assured me I would be able to handle because I was ‘such a responsible student.’ But the thing is, I missed my alarm, so I was in a bit of a rush to class and wasn’t paying much attention to my phone.”

Suga nodded, his face fixed in the expression that Daichi was convinced could have won him any customer service position on Earth, perfectly caught between genuine interest and innocent concern. “Sure, okay. Go on,” he urged, as if he didn’t already know where this story was going.

“So when I went to check the time during the lecture, I discovered that _someone_ has apparently figured out my password.” Daichi nudged the phone forward, tipped it toward Suga, and dramatically tapped the home button.

The phone lit up, displaying the home screen. Yesterday, the background had been a stock photo of a mountain meadow, all waving grass and almost clinically distributed wildflowers. 

Today, it was not.

Daichi knew exactly when Suga had taken the photo—about two weeks ago they’d had a movie marathon in Daichi’s room where they’d alternated picking titles, resulting in everything from a really emotional indie film to a hilariously bad horror flick to a documentary about the Olympics. It had been probably the most fun Daichi had ever had watching movies with anyone, although over the past couple months he’d discovered that was true of a lot of things done in Suga’s company.

Sometime during the fourth movie Daichi had started to fade. Leaning against Suga had been a thoughtless thing—first just their shoulders and arms touching, and then drowsily listing against him as his muscles relaxed further toward sleep. 

And then Suga had simply made it into the most natural thing in the world by draping his arm around Daichi’s shoulders and tucking his head in the dip between Daichi’s shoulder and chest, _like it was nothing_. His hair smelled nice, like mint or coconut or something not fruity but still sweetish and pleasant.

Sometimes Daichi couldn’t believe this new chapter in his college life was real. Cuddling still felt like a revelation.

He didn’t remember falling asleep, of course, but he’d woken up a few minutes later to walk Suga back to his dorm one block over, still apologizing for being the one to drift off and end their movie session. It hadn’t occurred to him that anything had happened in the interim until he’d found the photo saved in his phone album. 

Suga had taken it with the arm not wrapped around Daichi, who was practically nuzzling him, face half-buried in his temple. It was _not_ a flattering photo of him, but Suga’s smile into the camera was sleepy-warm and fond, and Daichi thought he might have been smiling a little himself in his sleep. It was an honest kind of picture, maybe more so than the handful of couple selfies they’d taken so far. So Daichi had kept it.

And maybe pulled it up to gaze at more often that he wanted to admit.

But he’d never expected to have it as his _background_. That felt so public, so startling, like suddenly finding a poster that was hanging in your bedroom had been taped to your chest. It wasn’t that Daichi regretted or wanted to hide _anything_ about Suga or their relationship, it was just that he hadn’t expected to be confronted with exactly how embarrassingly sappy Suga made him feel at 8 o’clock in the morning in the middle of a hundred of his peers.

“I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid don’t see your problem,” said Suga now, apologetically, his grin finally threatening to overtake his playfully professional demeanor. He flipped the phone so it was facing him and pretended to frown assessingly at the photo. “It’s a great picture. If you don’t mind me saying so, sir, you look absolutely adorable when you’re asleep.”

“ _Suga._ ” Somehow Daichi was finding himself smiling too, although now he didn’t know why he’d thought he could genuinely find a way scold Suga about this. It was fine when he rehearsed it in his head, but being face-to-face with his boyfriend tended to make conversations he’d planned out ahead of time evaporate. 

In that way, not much had changed since their technologically disastrous but ultimately effective courtship.

“Daichi, your stock wallpaper was _boring_ ,” Suga insisted.

“How did you even get into my phone?” Daichi shot back, unable to think of a good response to that—honestly he’d barely given his phone home screen a thought before today. “Did you use some hacking trick you learned here?” 

“Your passcode is _your birthday_ , which you told me on our third date. I don’t need to hack your phone.” Suga looked amused. He stretched idly, which always made his employee polo shirt pull taut in various and pleasing ways across his arms, chest, and shoulders. It was an extremely unfair tactic, especially since Suga now knew that Daichi had _feelings_ about the polo and how he looked in it.

Daichi sighed, any residual exasperation deflated, and picked his phone back up to take another look at the photo. Now that he wasn’t surprised and surrounded by classmates, he could appreciate the flush of warmth seeing it there made him feel. He found himself smiling at it again, the way he had in private, at the way they curved into each other, already so easy and comfortable.

“You do like it then,” Suga said, his expression and tone both softening. “I was a little worried I’d overstepped again and you really were upset with me.”

“Considering if you hadn’t ‘overstepped’ the first time we might not be dating right now, I think I can forgive you.” Daichi checked to make sure Tsukishima was deeply engrossed in his music and homework and that there were no other students in the area before he leaned across the counter and kissed Suga briefly. Another thing he still couldn’t quite believe he could do anytime he wanted.

“Does that mean you’ll keep it?” Suga asked when Daichi drew back.

Daichi pretended to think hard, and Suga laughed and took his free hand over the counter, lacing their fingers together and stroking his thumb over Daichi’s wrist until he almost really did forget what he was pretending to ponder.

“I’ll keep it. Until we take a better one, where I’m _awake_ ,” he said finally.

“I’m not sure that’s possible when you look that good asleep,” said Suga very seriously, and though his eyes had a teasing twinkle, Daichi got the feeling he wasn’t entirely kidding, and it made his cheeks and ears burn.

“Oh! I almost forgot—for the responsible student who made it through another 8 a.m. lecture.” Suga went back around the counter and picked up a black and white paper cup stamped with the silhouette of a crow perched on the rim of a mug. The lid was stoppered, so when Suga set it in front of Daichi and took the top off, a cloud of wonderful, cocoa-scented steam rose right into his face.

“ _You’re amazing,_ ” Daichi half-moaned, inhaling deeply. 

“I had them put a shot of espresso in it, to get you through the rest of the day.” 

Daichi took a careful sip before leaning back over the counter to kiss Suga again, a little longer this time. “I’m so glad I broke my old phone for you,” he murmured, tucking an escaped piece of Suga’s silvery hair back behind his ear. They weren’t at the ‘I love you’ stage yet, but the statement was rapidly becoming something Daichi thought of as a stand-in for it, a fervent expression of just how thrilled he was that their unorthodox journey of pining, flirting, and reckless electronic endangerment had somehow worked out after all.

“What time is your next class again?” Suga asked, bringing him back to the reality of the school day.

“Noon—I have some free time.” Daichi took another slow drink of the caffeine-spiked hot chocolate.

“Keep me company?” asked Suga, as they’d both known he was going to. “Monday mornings are always slow.” 

“Tsukishima will give us dirty looks.”

“Let him,” said Suga breezily, shooting his younger coworker a glance. “Yamaguchi-kun starts in an hour, he’ll mellow out then.”

Daichi couldn’t come behind the desk, but Suga let him have one of their comfortable wheeled chairs to pull up to the outside of the counter, so he could sip his drink and talk to Suga as he went back to work on the laptop someone had brought in the previous day. 

It would have felt impossible to him, just a few months earlier, that this could be his life. Even as he’d been making a total fool out of himself for the chance to talk to Suga again, there had been a part of his brain insisting that this could only last so long, that he was wasting his time. Now he needed no such excuses to visit the IT help desk, although he _had_ kind of had one this morning.

Daichi reached out and tilted his phone towards himself, half-listening as Suga told him about the latest victim Nishinoya had pointed their way, a devastated freshman with a brand new Christmas gift smartphone like Daichi’s that had gotten left in a pocket and washed. He glanced from Suga’s animated face as he dimpled at the memory of the student tearing up with relief and gratitude when offered the rice treatment, to the Suga in the photo on his home screen with an arm around him and his face fondly gazing into the camera as if to say how lucky _he_ was.

His phone had helped him find Suga, and now it could remind him whenever he looked at it that sometimes, even impossible, foolish things could still go right.

Daichi was _definitely_ keeping his new home screen photo. Maybe even after they took a new one.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I'm at booksong.tumblr.com if you ever want to say hi, or talk about fiction, fandom, anime, or writing! Thank you all so, so much for reading. <3


End file.
